I mentioned in passing in a post about SharePoint Online 15 last week that Microsoft will be evolving Office Web Apps into a new and separate server product. Now I have a few more details.

Users currently can access Office Web Apps in a handful of ways. They can use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and/or Safari to access them for free through SkyDrive, Hotmail and Docs.com. Business users can host Office Web Apps on SharePoint on-premises and/or access them as part of their Office 365 cloud plans.

With Office 15/SharePoint 15, Microsoft is introducing a new separate product, known as Office Web Apps Server. This server will be able to serve multiple SharePoint farms for viewing and editing documents. In addition, a server or a farm running Office Web Apps will be able to view files stored across data stores, including those in Microsoft server products like SharePoint Server, Exchange Server and Lync; URL-accessible file servers; and certain third-party stores that integrate (like EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText and Oracle).

The thinking behind the move is by separating Office Web Apps from SharePoint, administrators will be able to manage and update Office Web Apps separately from SharePoint. They'll also be able serve multiple SharePoint farms, along with Exchange Server and Lync Server, from one Office Web Apps Server environment.

So what about Office Mobile Web Apps -- yet another Office Web Apps variant, but one that is specific to mobile phones and mobile browsers? As of the SharePoint 15 Technical Preview, the new Office Web Apps Server, and not SharePoint Server, will be what enables the mobile version of Office Web Apps.

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 30 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008). She also is the cohost of the "Windows Weekly" podcast on the TWiT network.
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Disclosure

Freelance journalist/blogger Mary Jo Foley has nothing to disclose. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). I do not own Microsoft stock or stock in any of its partners or competitors. I have no business ventures that are sponsored by Microsoft or any of its partners or competitors.